The women in Munro's stories

When I first read through Alice Munro's The Wilderness Station I was somewhat disappointed, thought it was a story that began really well - an epistolary story that recounts the early life of a woman who goes off to remote Ontario as something like a mail-order bride in about 1850, lives w/ two brothers married to one; her husband dies apparently struck by a falling tree limb, she and surviving brother bury him and both leave the remote farm - she goes off to a nearby town where she turns up at the prison and confesses to murdering her husband - but her story is not credible; through a set of letters she writes from prison we learn the true circumstances - one brother killed the other and they conspire to bury the dead and claim the death was accidental. Then the story jumps to the near present, as we get a long letter from a woman to a historian recounting an event of her youth - when she took the woman - Old Annie, she was called - to visit the surviving brother whom she had not seen since the fateful events. On first reading, I thought this concluding section didn't give us a great deal of new information - they go to the surviving brother, now an old man with a long white beard, but we don't know what Old Annie says to him or he in return. Old Annie reports he didn't say much but she did. On reflection, though, I have come to think that this is a terrific and mysterious conclusion to the story: obviously, Old Annie told him her story, that she had spent her entire life in near seclusion and eccentricity because she agreed to cover up his murderous act - while he has become a patriarch of a reasonably prosperous farm family. She has suffered for his sins, and he has not - or seems not to have. Munro is usually more direct and "maximal" in her story lines, but this is a rare occasion of her telling truth through ellipsis - the silence of the story speaks to the horror and sadness of the experience, to the lives broken by a single act, and of course to the repression and sublimation of the woman - taking on all of the burden, freeing the man. Munro has been called a feminist writer I'm sure, but though that may be true she is never didactic or polemical - her protagonists are often repressed, disappointed in life, shy, silent, observers - often librarians, teachers (in remote settings), bookstore owners (in Vancouver) - but they also almost always push the boundaries of their personalities and of the expectations of society - they are rebels, unconventional, sometimes mean and foolhardy (several of them end marriages or betray husbands - who are generally kind and thoughtful if dull and conventional) - even abandon children; they're not perfect, they're often victims (especially in the 21st-century stories). Again, I come away from a series of stories in Munro's 1996 Seleccted Stories amazed at how much material each story contains - so many could be made into movies (few have), so many could be developed into novels (fortunately, Munro remains true to the beauty of the short story - even as she breaks w/ convention in so many ways).